Journal
NANOMATERIALS
Volume 8, Issue 6, Pages -Publisher
MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/nano8060440
Keywords
FTO; nanocomposite; Al2O3; haze factor; optical scattering; TCO
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Funding
- European Doctoral Program IDS-FunMat and EJD-FunMat
- Agence Nationale de Recherche (ANR, France) [CE05 INDEED]
- Marie Curie Actions (FP7) [631111]
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In this study, we report the use of Al2O3 nanoparticles in combination with fluorine doped tin oxide (F:SnO2, aka FTO) thin films to form hazy Al2O3-FTO nanocomposites. In comparison to previously reported FTO-based nanocomposites integrating ZnO and sulfur doped TiO2 (S:TiO2) nanoparticles (i.e., ZnO-FTO and S:TiO2-FTO nanocomposites), the newly developed Al2O3-FTO nanocomposites show medium haze factor H-T of about 30%, while they exhibit the least loss in total transmittance T-tot. In addition, Al2O3-FTO nanocomposites present a low fraction of large-sized nanoparticle agglomerates with equivalent radius r(eq) > 1 mu m; effectively 90% of the nanoparticle agglomerates show r(eq) < 750 nm. The smaller feature size in Al2O3-FTO nanocomposites, as compared to ZnO-FTO and S:TiO2-FTO nanocomposites, makes them more suitable for applications that are sensitive to roughness and large-sized features. With the help of a simple optical model developed in this work, we have simulated the optical scattering by a single nanoparticle agglomerate characterized by bottom radius r(0), top radius r(1), and height h. It is found that r(0) is the main factor affecting the H-T(lambda), which indicates that the haze factor of Al2O3-FTO and related FTO nanocomposites is mainly determined by the total surface coverage of all the nanoparticle agglomerates present.
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